Printers Set to Tour Mail/Ship Operations at 4 Louisville Sites
By Tom Quinn & Mark Vruno -- graphic arts online, 3/1/2007
The third annual joint MFSA & NAPL Fulfillment Conference in late April will feature plant tours of Louisville-area printers/mailers, including a nighttime visit to the UPS Worldport air service hub. Attendees will see:
Preferred Marketing Solutions: a wholly owned subsidiary of the Papa John's International pizza empire. PMS houses a 36,400-sq.ft. print/fulfillment facility that is fed by: a Kodak NexPress 2100 plus digital printer, two 29´´ Heidelberg Speedmaster sheetfeds, a 2-color Quickmaster offset press and a new Goss Sunday 2000 press, sans folder, installed last June for short-run web work.
Not an in-plant print shop, the profit center has some 150 employees who serve its parent's franchisers as well as external customers—to the combined sales tune of approximately $30 million annually. Its three-shift operation prints direct mail, free-standing inserts, box-top coupons, POP materials, door hangers, flyers and more.
Pizza-company work accounts for about 60% of the job mix, but commercial work is expected to grow substantially with the new Goss—perhaps surpassing Papa John's work by a 2:1 margin in three years, according to a company spokesperson. Clients include Wal-Mart, Six Flags, Lee's Chicken, Anthem, the Kentucky Derby Festival and GE. www.preferredms.org
Fulfillment Concepts, Inc. (FCI): a traditional, third-party fulfillment company specializing in e-commerce, literature and product fulfillment. These services are supplemented with color digital printing on a Xerox DocuColor 40 and black-and-white variable data on a DocuTech 6135. FCI offers programs for sales/service/marketing support materials, point-of-sale advertising, consumer promotions and trade show materials. www.fulfillmentconcepts.com
aNETorder/American Mailers: provides product fulfillment support to book publishers from a 320,000-sq.ft. facility. Its Oracle-based, warehouse-management system moves product seamlessly, resulting in order-shipping accuracy and flexibility. Barcode scanning allows for even returns processing to be automated. www.anetorder.com
UPS Worldport: operations center that's more than double the size of the company's previous sort operation at Louisville International Airport, where a UPS plane lands every 90 seconds during peak hours. UPS broke ground on a $1 billion, 1 million-sq.ft. expansion last summer. The new hub, combined with the existing sorting facility, encompasses nearly 4 million sq.ft.—the equivalent of 80 football fields! Over the next four years, sorting capacity will increase more than 60% to 487,000 packages per hour.
“Smart labels” read by overhead cameras will facilitate processing. Once containers are removed from planes, the average package is touched by human hands only twice during its 15-minute journey. To track each package, computers make 59 million database transactions every hour. www.ups.com
